The Arrow
by naggeluide
Summary: The obligatory fic where Toph finds out about … Aang's tattoos? And everyone else's as well.


"Geez, Arrowhead, lighten up," Sokka says, arms waving enthusiastically as he explains. "It's just a joke. It's funny because koala-sheep don't have hands!"

Awkward silence follows, engulfing the group gathered around the small campfire that Zuko had lit earlier to fight off the chill coming off of the ocean onto the damp sand.

Aang still looks a little upset when Toph pipes up. "Why'd you call him Arrowhead? Aang's head isn't that pointy. In fact it's almost perfectly round."

Sokka blinks. "Uh, because of his tattoos?" he says slowly, then blinks again at his own stupidity. "Fuck," he swears softly - clearly he's been picking up bad habits from his sparring matches with Zuko - at the same time Toph asks: "What tattoos?"

Aang perks up at the chance to spread knowledge of his cultural heritage to an interested party. "When an acolyte masters airbending, they get tattoos running along their chi paths! They're shaped like arrows in tribute to the natural markings of sky bison - "

"_Appa_ has tattoos?" Toph sounds delighted, and Sokka has to admit he's never thought of it that way.

"No, he was born like that!" Aang laughs. "But he only has one large arrow, starting at the end of his tail and ending on his forehead, since that's his main chi path. Mine are different, so I have five arrows!"

"You match _Appa_? That's the cutest shit I've ever heard in my life!" Toph is terrifyingly close to squealing in delight, but that quickly turns to downright terrifying as she gestures in the direction of everyone else and hollers at them. "And none of you fuckers ever thought to tell me about this?"

Guilty silence follows, until Suki shrugs apologetically. "Sorry, Toph. Sometimes we forget that with sight we note different things about appearances than you do. And that gets so ingrained with our idea of a person's identity that we probably forget to bring it up when we think of or talk about them." She turns to Katara. "If I asked you to describe Toph, what would you say?"

"Greatest earthbender in the world?" Katara offers, much to Toph's delight and Sokka's huff of contempt. Someone's clearly trying to curry favor.

Suki fixes the younger girl with a hard look but decides Katara's squandered her chance. "Zuko?" she asks instead.

"Um," he starts, not expecting to be put on the spot. "You want me to describe her physical appearance, or just how she is?"

"Both, if you can."

"Scary."

Toph rewards Zuko's honest assessment with a punch to the ribs, then picks up their previous discussion. "So, back to Aang. Can I feel his tattoos?"

"No," Aang says, sounding disappointed himself. "They're just light blue ink under my skin."

"Bleah, colors," Toph intones, and Sokka privately has to agree. He hadn't even known there were so many colors that didn't fall into some variety of blue or white before he'd left the pole, and for the first few months he'd had constant arguments with Aang and Katara about the definitions of red and green. They looked pretty much the same to him, so at first he'd thought it was one big practical joke but not even Katara could be that mean for so long, so Sokka had accepted that he'd probably just scalded that particular color sensitivity out of his eyeballs as a young kid staring at the snow too long in the sunshine.

"Come feel my head anyway, I'll show you exactly where the arrows are!" Aang offers instead.

"Okay!"

Sokka's not the only one stifling laughter at the sight of Aang carefully tracing Toph's finger over where he thinks his arrows are, and Katara leaping to intervene when he gets it wildly wrong on the top of his skull where he can't see the markings. Toph seems pleased with the outcome, though, although Sokka thinks it's because she now has an extra piece of ammunition in her arsenal of things to tease Aang about .

"Who else has tattoos?" Toph asks eagerly when they're done with the arrows on Aang's hands and feet too. "What else am I missing?"

"No one else has tattoos," Sokka volunteers, but instead of the conversation progressing to the next subject, he's greeted with a strained silence. He blinks, slowly. "No one else has tattoos, _right?_" He's making intense eye contact with his sister as he says this and her own blue eyes are shifting guiltily away.

He's so disappointed in her. "What the fuck, Katara," he yells, not even caring about foreign influences on his vocabulary anymore.

"Sugar Queen's not the only one blushing," crows Toph, and part of Sokka is proud that she's so quick to apply the knowledge he'd imparted the other day - that sighted people could see when other people's faces got hot, although with some skin tones it's more obvious than others - and part is raging with curiosity as he looks quickly at the rest of his circle. A circle filled with horrible, traitorous human beings apparently, because although Katara's blush is barely perceptible to the untrained eye, Zuko is burning up like the furnace he is and even Suki has a dusting of pink across her cheekbones.

"You're all dead to me," he intones, and wants to add more but Katara's started to talk.

"So, you know I was in prison …"

"THAT WAS FOR A DAY AND A HALF," Sokka wails, because wasn't she supposed to be the responsible one? He mutters under his breath about _telling Dad_.

"Anyway. Prison's really boring?" Sokka was back to feeling _even more left out_ because everyone except him and Toph was nodding the knowing nod of the formerly incarcerated.

"So this happened." Katara pulls aside her dress and the strap of the wrappings underneath to expose her left collarbone, and Sokka doesn't miss how interested Aang is at that. But they're all interested, because there's a small word written in old Water Tribe script right underneath, and Sokka has to read it twice because it's been a long time since he's read traditional script and he can't be seeing what he thinks he's seeing.

"Why did you get 'sea prunes' tattooed on your collarbone?" Zuko is asking in an echo of Sokka's train of thought, which confirms that he was in fact not reading it wrong but…

"How do you know what it says?" Sokka asks at the same time Katara scowls and says, "It says 'liberty', not 'sea prunes'!"

Zuko, as usual, looks a little overwhelmed at the choice of statements to react to, and chooses to go with Sokka's. "Azula and I studied about how to overthrow the Northern Water Tribe when I was younger? So of course we had to know how to read street signs and all that."

Sokka deliberately ignores that rampant imperialistic mindset to address the more pressing concern. "Sis, can you actually see that tattoo?"

Katara goes cross-eyed trying for a minute, but finally admits: "Not very well."

"And did anyone on that prison rig actually _know_ traditional Water Tribe script?"

"Well…. probably not."

"I wanna know what it looks like!" Toph bursts in, and Sokka takes a stick and traces it in the sand for her in as close to a life-sized replica as he can get. "It's got a nice shape," she decides. "I don't care if it means sea prunes, I think it's pretty."

Aang adds an enthusiastic nod, and Suki agrees too. "As someone who has no idea how to read Water Tribe," Suki adds.

Katara still looks upset, but that's what she got for getting prison tattoos and not telling Sokka. Or anyone else for that matter.

"Wait, do you have prison tattoos too?" he asks Suki, and that adorable flush is still there.

"Prison is really, _really_ boring," the Kyoshi warrior confirms, and hitches up her tunic. She turns around and there on her lower back just above the very attractive swell of ... _hips_ is… a butterfly made out of weapons?

"It's four fans and a sword," Suki explains the details of the shape, and damn but that's badass, cute and so very _Suki_.

"That's really well done," Zuko compliments, and Sokka has to agree. And immediately become suspicious, because what exactly did _that_ imply?

"What's _your_ tattoo, Zuko?" he asks, but doesn't get a reply because Toph is badgermole-ing him to draw Suki's for her in the sand. There's quite a bit of discussion around his rendering, because the other girls keep telling him he didn't do it right, but in the end it's satisfactory and Toph decides that it's the best tattoo she's seen so far.

… Sokka almost lets that one get past him.

He almost lets Zuko get away with using the distraction, too, because the firebender is collecting their teacups in a bid to make a discreet disappearance when Sokka snatches up his own teacup possessively and holds it like a hostage while he asks, again: "What's your tattoo, Zuko?"

"I don't have a tattoo," Zuko lies, as Toph yells "LIE" gleefully and sinks him up to his ankles in the sand, leaving him juggling teacups for a moment to keep them from breaking at the sudden drop.

"Your earthsense isn't that good on sand," the prince protests, but all the sighted people back Sokka up when he points out no one needed earthsense to tell that that was a blatant lie.

"Uh, guys, maybe if Zuko doesn't want to show us his tattoo we shouldn't make him," Aang says, ever considerate. "What if it's from something… er…. traumatic?"

There's a slight pause as the group sans Toph considers that very likely possibility, given the firebender's _other_ permanent marking, but teenaged curiosity quickly dismisses it.

Zuko does, too, sounding a bit put out as he grumbles that there were years where he'd actually had it pretty good, and puts down the stack of cups before proceeding to shuck off his surcoat and shirt to stand bare-chested in the firelight. Sokka's mouth is suddenly dry and he feels like he's missing something because he doesn't see ink anywhere, but to be fair the unfair definition of Zuko's abs is pretty distracting.

Zuko looks uncomfortable from all the attention in a way he never is with firebending practice, expecting his taste to be judged perhaps. "Uh, Zuko?" Aang asks. "I don't see your tattoo?"

"That's _my_ line," Toph complains with a punch to Aang's bicep, and Zuko stutters an "oh", kicks his feet free of the sand, and turns around.

"Tui and La, the _Prince of the Fire Nation_ has a tramp stamp," says Katara with unholy glee, and Sokka is so busy trying to regulate the temperature of his face as his eyes move lower and lower down fine planes of muscle to where Zuko's pants are slung low on his hips that he almost misses it.

"Wow, I love your tattoo Zuko!" Aang is on his feet in excitement, crowding his firebending teacher for a closer look. Sokka gets up too, if only so he can see around Aang, and nearly trips on a giggling Suki.

"It's adorable!" she's saying but there are tears of mirth in her eyes.

"Tell me!" Toph demands, and … Sokka blinks once, twice, and starts talking.

"It's a … an octopus cat? A catopus?" However one describes a fluffy monstrosity with the head of a cat and a body of furred tentacles, which Sokka doubted was a real thing with the same certainty with which he knew whoever was responsible for this tattoo was no artist.

"Her name was Sushi," Zuko mutters into his hands which are covering his face in embarrassment. "She was the ship's cat."

"These things exist?" Sokka cries in terror, thinking that at least he'll have some variety in his nightmares now besides the usual defeat-the-Fire-Lord-save-the-world stuff.

"I've heard of those!" says Aang, ever the animal enthusiast. "They're pretty rare, right? Tropical? But great for catching vole-mice!"

"Yeah," Zuko says, calmer now that he's talking about fuzzy demon-pets.

"You don't strike me as a cat person," Suki comments from where her giggle fit is subsiding. "How'd you end up with that tattoo?"

"Uh, so do you know how people say that you shouldn't fall asleep in a room full of your friends because they'll draw on you? Azula told me about that once," Zuko starts.

"Oh yeah, we did that at the Air Temple all the time!" Aang breaks in. "We didn't use needles though, just ink!"

"Right," Zuko says. "Well, it was my birthday and I got really drunk -"

Predictably, Katara _tsks _and scolds Zuko about underaged drinking, only to be assured that it was his sixteenth birthday so that was legally acceptable.

"So anyway," Zuko continues, "the crew - this was before Zhao blew up my ship _and my catopus with it_ \- they wanted to take me to a … to a certain type of establishment, but I didn't want to go so I said I wanted to go get tattoos to immortalize our friendship instead - I was pretty out of it, or I _definitely_ wouldn't have wanted friendship tattoos with those troublemakers - so they took me to a tattoo parlor instead. I don't remember how I ended up choosing Sushi, but the story goes that they asked me if there was anything that I would like and I said 'my father's love and respect' but that clearly was never going to happen and so then I said 'sushi' only they thought I meant the cat and not that I was hungry. But now that she's gone, and she really was the best cat … I'm glad I've got something to remember her by. Even if I can't see it."

"Wow," is all Sokka can say to that, because like most of Zuko's stories it's a crate full of soft wood chips transporting a whole lot of knives.

"So we're the only ones without tattoos," Toph says to Sokka after she's finished rating the cuteness of the sand rendition he draws for her with shaking fingers. "Wanna get some?"

"Yes," Sokka responds immediately, despite all the other people yelling "no" for him. Bunch of hypocrites.

"Hey, Suki, did you learn how to tattoo people while you were in prison?"

"I wasn't there for that long, Toph, sorry."

"No worries, I bet we can get some in town! Hey Zuko, we can use your dad's money to pay for them, right?"

Zuko blinks, but it's with a slight frown that he says: "Normally I'd like nothing better, but are you sure you should be doing this? Toph, you wouldn't even be able to see it! And Sokka - you'll blow your cover if you get a tattoo that says 'seal jerky' in Water Tribe script."

The full smugness of Katara's evil face is suddenly right next to Sokka's, and her smirk is more vengeful than he'd thought her capable of. Except she'd had a straight-up vendetta with a guy a few days prior, so …

"Yes, brother dear," she croons in the sweet tones of the dangerously unhinged. "Let's get sibling tattoos!"

"I'm not getting a tattoo that says 'seal jerky'!" Sokka protests. Although… there could be worse things to get a tattoo of. Like that cosmic horror of a catopus, for example. "I'll get a sword or a wolf head or something! It's for my warrior image!" he tries to explain to his potential sponsor. "You and Suki both have badass tattoos, she's got her war-makeup as well and you've got that giant facial scar, what do I have? _Nothing!_"

The following silence is familiar to Sokka in a way that makes him immediately replay his words to figure out what it was he'd said that he shouldn't have.

"Zuko has a WHAT?" Toph explodes, just as realization dawns. "You guys never tell me anything!"

* * *

**A/N:** Now insert your favorite 'Gaang finds out about Zuko's scar' fic here

Originally an abbreviated version of this scene was going to go in _The Duke's a Hazard_, the plot of which, as it were, is 'Zuko gets adopted by the Duke and Sokka is voluntold to co-parent, otherwise canon-as-usual'.

But it took on a life of its own and I've been trying to keep the chapters short (ha ha). So have it here as a one-shot, or if you want to fit it into the story it would go between chapters 6 and 7 and we'll just assume the Duke is already asleep when this all goes down. Sushi is not my creation, she belongs to MuffinLance.

Yeah Suki has a butterfly tramp stamp, but is anyone going to give her shit about it? No effin' way.


End file.
